Let there be light – but let it be efficient

I haven’t done any counting, but I believe I have more actual lightbulbs than I had 15 years ago but reports show I’m using less electricity for them.  Guy Chazan writes in the Financial Times about the significant decrease in electricity used for lighting in British homes since 1997.  A friend of EiD, Brenda Boardman, is quoted that consumption has dropped 30%.  No doubt the same results have been found throughout Europe and it would be good to hear if this is true.

Nearly a third less electricity used to light homes than in 1997

Energy prices may be rising in the UK, but there is a small light on the horizon as people use nearly a third less electricity to light their homes than they did 16 years ago.

The improvement is because of the phasing out of inefficient incandescent lightbulbs and their replacing them with energy-efficient alternatives.

Chief among them is the compact fluorescent bulb, which uses 80 per cent less electricity than the older kind but produces the same amount of light.

The change is one of the reasons why peak electricity demand has been falling in the UK: average domestic electricity consumption dropped 5 per cent between 2008 and 2012, according to government statistics.

Brenda Boardman, emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, says that thanks to more efficient bulbs, the average amount of electricity needed annually to light a UK home fell from 720 kilowatt-hours in 1997 to less than 500 kWh last year, a drop of more than 30 per cent.

That has had a big impact on broader household energy consumption, since lighting makes up a quarter of total peak residential electricity demand.

Lower consumption also means lower bills. The Energy Saving Trust says the UK could save as much as £1.4bn on electricity bills every year if households phased out their remaining filament bulbs.

Those savings could be even greater if people switch to light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, which have long been used in car brakelights and the infrared beams of television remote controls but are now so powerful they can light a whole room.

While LED products still cost more to produce than conventional lighting, they last longer, produce more light and use very little energy.

Yet even with more efficient lightbulbs, electricity use is much higher in the UK than elsewhere in Europe. European Commission data show UK consumption of electricity, both for lighting and appliances, was 3,165 kWh per household in 2010 – 13 per cent more than the European average.

The gulf is most striking when Britain is compared with Germany. UK households consume 36 per cent more electricity than German ones. The per unit price of electricity is 50 per cent higher in Germany but, because consumption is lower, the average German bill is only about 10 per cent higher than the UK bill.

The shift towards more efficient bulbs has been driven by policy. The European Commission has phased out the sale of standard incandescent bulbs, a technology that remains unchanged since it was developed in the 1870s by rival inventors Joseph Swan of the UK and Thomas Edison of the US. It is also removing more inefficient halogen bulbs from sale by 2016.

Various UK government schemes have also helped to accelerate the rollout of energy-saving lightbulbs, millions of which were given away for free by energy companies.

National Grid estimates that electricity demand for lighting could halve by 2020 – from about 12.5 terawatt hours currently to 6 TWh – even as the number of bulbs increases. Much of that drop will be driven by the switchover to high-quality and low-cost LED bulbs, it says.

But while many households have opted for better bulbs, local councils have been laggards. The UK’s 7m street lights clock up an electricity bill of more than £300m a year and, although street lighting is one of the largest single items in local authorities’ budgets, fewer than 1m lamps are low energy.

However, there has been some progress. The UK Green Investment Bank is offering local authorities low, fixed rate loans to help finance the switch to low-energy street lights. The bank says such a transition could reduce their electricity bill by up to 80 per cent.

Glasgow City Council, which plans to convert its 70,000 street lights to low energy, will be the first recipient of the loan.